Introduction to Flask and Python

This is intended as a quick overview of the new layout associated with flask.

Initial Setup

Now that we are using a python backend, you need to have python, virtualenv, and sqlite available (installation is beyond the scope of this document; I'm including ubuntu-based instructions as a baseline).

# Install packages for ubuntu; skip this if it doesn't apply
sudo apt-get install python python-virtualenv git git-flow

git clone git@github.com:MultiverseMiner/multiverseminer.git
cd multiverseminer
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate

if using another branch, git checkout here.

pip install -r requirements.txt -r Testing-requirements.txt
cp config.py.sample config.py

Make sure to set your google auth keys here

py.test
./db_migrate.py db init
./db_migrate.py db migrate
./db_migrate.py db upgrade

Starting the App

There are two ways to start the app: debug mode (good for debugging):

./run.py

or production mode:

gunicorn mm:app

Layout

The actual layout is quite simple-

.
├── mm
│   ├── static
│   │   ├── css
│   │   ├── images
│   │   ├── js
│   │   └── gen
│   └── templates
├── data
├── env
└── tests

• mm/: base directory of the application
• mm/static/: for css, js and other non-dynamic files
• mm/static/gen/: directory for dynamically minified js and css
• mm/templates/: directory for templated HTML files.
• data/: location for storing static data (like Item data)
• env/: directory for virtualenv (you'll never need to venture in here)
• tests/: unit tests are kept here.